came to see him, an individual who is not a criminal lawyer and allegedly not the appropriate person to defend him, in the opinion of Mr. Chaparro, but a person who can be considered a witness to the fact that he was interrogated without the presence of a defense lawyer. 13. As a consequence, Mr. Chaparro was informed that the police, in an arbitrary and illegal manner, was attempting to involve him in an antinarcotics operation known as the “Rivera Case.” According to the petition, Mr. Chaparro’s involvement was alleged to have been as the supplier of the styrofoam containers, in which, under the pretext of exporting fish, smaller plastic boxes filled with drugs were found. Mr. Chaparro asserts that his detention was based on a mistake both of the police and the Judge in charge of the case, and alleges that this is a clear violation of the principal of the presumption of innocence set forth in the American Convention. When he was permitted to see one of the containers seized in the operation he could tell that the thickness of the bottom was much greater than in the containers that his factory produced. Further, the marks that are left by injecting the raw material do not correspond to those made by the machines in his factory. Mr. Chaparro requested that Captain Peralta request an expert from a prestigious institution that knows something about the subject to come and confirm that the container shown to him was not made by Plumavit Factory. The police requested the assistance of an expert from the Mechanical Engineering Faculty of the Technical College of the Litoral. They received the response from the expert on December 5, 1997 to the effect that the Plumavit Factory of Ecuador did not manufacture these containers. 14. According to the petitioners, the police, illegally and arbitrarily, and knowing that Mr. Chaparro had nothing to do with what they were investigating, criminally hid the results of the expert evaluation until December 10, 1997, with the sole purpose of involving him in crimes which he did not commit and, then, to take control over his property. Thereafter, they included the evaluation in the file as a loose sheet of paper. In spite of the lack of evidence tying him to the charges, as required by Article 333 No. 4 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the judge, in the formal initiation of the proceedings charged him with being a “member of an international syndicate of drug traffickers”, thereby violating his right to be presumed innocent, as guaranteed by the American Convention. The police had illegally searched the Plumavit Factory, owned by the petitioner, and a special dog was brought in that was trained to track down drugs by scent. No remains of drugs were found anywhere. Subsequently, on the day when the experts from E.S.P.O.L. performed their evaluation, police officers and technicians from the US Drug Enforcement Administration brought an Ion-Scanner to detect particles of drugs and also found no evidence of drugs anywhere in the Factory. 15. The Judge ordered three further evaluations to be carried out at the Factory. Mr. Chaparro requested that he be permitted to be present, but when the Judge was late they returned him to prison, allegedly infringing on his right to defend himself. The police suggested that he could bribe them by paying them at least two million sucres to be allowed to wait for the judge. He refused. The judge finally arrived and carried out three further evaluations and was able to demonstrate that the seized containers did not fit into the molds used in his Factory. These tests supported the earlier findings that his factory could not have produced the containers seized. 16. Three days later, on January 8, 1998, the police with the D.E.A. experts returned with the judge to the Factory with the ION- Scanner and stated that there were vestiges of the drugs in one of the molds. Since the defense lawyers were not allowed to be present, the petitioners were unable to impugn this act that occurred 45 days after the police had taken over control of the Factory, which leads one to believe that the Ecuadorian police was planting the evidence. The Ecuadorian Drug Law of 1990 permitted the seizure of goods, which had been used for the commission of the crimes set forth in the law. Since November 15, 1997, Mr. Chaparro’s Factory was seized, allegedly in an illegal and arbitrary manner, and was placed under the control of the National Drugs Council (Consejo Nacional de Control de Sustancias Estupefacientes y Psicotropicas, CONSEP). CONSEP rented the factory to an individual in January 1998. According to